For the first May long weekend in 41 years, the Ontario Place gates will not swing open on a summer of wholesome, waterlogged, government-prescribed fun.

They remain locked until at least 2017. Where map-clutching crowds once surged across the bridge, only security guards now saunter.

Folks still file to the marina, Molson Canadian Amphitheatre and Atlantis Pavilion banquet hall. But those water-spouting bikes, seemingly powered by shrieks of delight, are still and dry. The Wilderness Adventure Ride is as forlorn as an actual gold-rush outpost.

“It’s sad to walk through. The outside looks pretty much the same but inside, for example in the pods where there was a smaller theatre and rooms with exhibits, it’s empty and abandoned. You’d just be shaking your head saying, ‘How did this happen?’”

Still, Tory is glad the provincial Liberal government, faced with ever-shrinking attendance and ever-growing deficits, “decided to suck it up and do what probably had to be done in terms of closing it for now and having a rapid process to say ‘What are we going to do with this?’”

There remains among many, including those who know the educational amusement park needs a big reboot, potent nostalgia for its past, and hopes some of the magic will survive.

My strongest memories are of late 1980s summers — selling tickets at the gate and, later, as a media/public relations assistant. The pay was great (later cut to minimum wage) and official parties so wild we were blacklisted by venues including O.P. itself.

We kept order at The Forum (the much-missed, grass-hilled amphitheatre with a rotating stage and nightly shows by big-name bands), patrolled the swinging punching bags in Children’s Village, gassed up Bumper Boats and consoled crowds broiling in line on the Cinesphere ramps.

Americans asked for directions to “Kiddie Land” and “the big golf ball”, then complained they had paid us in U.S. greenbacks and got back Canadian “funny money.” We met the famous, like Moses Znaimer and Ben E. King, and the furtive, like the guy with two young sons at the gate who peered in asking: “You got any games o' chance in there?”

We got schooled in the seamy side of privilege. Political connections got lots of kids hired, and didn’t hurt some senior managers. Efficiency was not a watchword, and wrongdoing — like the shift of money-pilfering parking attendants — was dealt with quietly, if at all.

My memories are unusual. Most are like those of Jacki Leroux, who visited from Oshawa with her family in the mid-70s. Driving by the site today floods her with “warm and fuzzy” memories of fun with her late mom.

“I think of the Children’s Village, sitting on the grass and eating junk food while watching live shows, riding on the pedal boats, fireworks, eating lots of food and having my caricature drawn when I was 12,” she says. “I still have that drawing today.”

Urban explorer and writer Shawn Micallef, who visited from Windsor in the 1980s and 1990s, missed the glory days. He gets his nostalgia second-hand, from his parents’ photos of opening year 1971.

“They're faded in that way Instagram mimics, but the colours are still all primary and the miniskirts all seemed very optimistic and everybody seems happy, part of that Canadian Expo 67 era's sprit that we, who came later, seemed to live in the shadow of,” Micallef says. “On those (later) visits to O.P. I think I was always trying to find traces of it, but didn't come up with much. Maybe it never existed, except in photos.”

Tory says he might also doubt the reverie except he himself felt it, and people keep stopping him to say they did too.

“The number of people who mention The Forum as part of what they liked in the past, and what they’d like to see somehow re-created in the future is gigantic and ranks way ahead of everything else,” he says.

People also reminisce about the waterfront bars, including Sailor’s Pub and Kelly’s, and Children’s Village with its chaotic splash park and innovative “non-powered” play spaces.

“You take all those memories and you can’t recreate them but can you, you know, do the 2012 equivalent of all that?” Tory wonders. But don’t expect The Forum Mark II — the province could never afford big-name acts every night, and the Amphitheatre has a lease.

All Tory will say about recommendations coming this summer is they will be “viable and implementable as opposed to the most dramatic thing in the world. I want excellence but I also want something (the province) can do.”

Micallef, part of the demographic poised to make future family memories, hopes Ontario Place is turned into a 24-hour, all-season space free to enter and a continuation of the public waterfront. The lagoons should stay, and potentially some amusements that might need updating.

People should live at Ontario Place, he says, in well-designed buildings ensuring there is always life on the site. Above all, he says, the province must save the pods — the great, white, water-crab buildings squatting over the lagoon — and the geodesic dome Cinesphere they seem to protect.

“They're stunning pieces of unique Toronto architectural heritage that no other city has. Losing them would be a crime.”

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